


Inconnu

by aireyv



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Liquid is tagged as a character even though he IS said decomposing corpse, M/M, Mission Fic, decomposing corpse, ft. the Nomad except it's an RV, he's not even there in spirit this is 2007 he's in Ocelot's arm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-21 23:16:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13751253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aireyv/pseuds/aireyv
Summary: RAIDENWhat about -- what about the DNA results from that body?OTACONThat was Liquid's body. He and Snake are identical on the genetic level.RAIDENLiquid.OTACONA deception -- for our own protection. We stole his frozen body from some organization. Kind of a hassle though...SNAKEThat's all there is to it.





	Inconnu

**Author's Note:**

> _Another_ #MGS Offscreen scrap retrofitted to submit in the Wintergames! Prompt: "Teamwork"
> 
> also alternate summary  
> 

“What kind of organizational system are we looking at, Snake?” Otacon asked over Codec.

“Alphabetical by name,” Snake said, walking down the first row of drawers. “Real names, not code names, it looks like. Some of these people don’t have last names, though.”

“A lot of John Does?”

“Yeah,” Snake said, looking at almost two shelves’ worth of inconnus. “You think Liquid is being stored under John Doe?”

“Actually, I don’t think so,” Otacon said, “if you were given the name David, then it stands to reason that he was given a name too, right?”

“How am I supposed to find him, then?” Snake said, “I have no idea what his real name is. I’m guessing you don’t either.”

“No, I…” he trailed off.

“…Otacon, you knew him a lot longer than me. Are you _sure_ you never heard anyone call him by his real name?”

“I-I’m not sure, actually,” Otacon said, racking his brain, “but… I mean, I only met him a few weeks before you did, and he barely talked to me. Even if the others in FOXHOUND ever used his real name, I wouldn’t have been around to hear it. He was British, though, why don’t you try looking for English names? A lot of the names in there are going to be French, right?”

“Only about a third of these are French from what I’ve seen so far,” Snake said. “If I check every body with an English name, I’d be here for hours. And we still don’t know if opening one of these drawers is going to set off any kind of alarm.”

“I know, I know,” Otacon said, “I’m thinking.” After a moment, he suddenly tapped his fist into his open palm. “I just remembered- hang on, Snake. Just give me a minute.” He signed off.

Snake frowned, and just stood there with his arms crossed and his breath fogging in front of his face, waiting for Otacon to call him back with _something_.

Meanwhile, Otacon was digging under the bed for a small box of his personal belongings. He found it, pulled it out, opened it, and shoved aside his DS and PSP and old Walkman and The AI Pod’s Final Recording (Copy) to find what he’d been looking for - the unsigned letter that had came enclosed with The AI Pod’s Final Recording (Copy) ten years ago. He hadn’t read it since the day it came in the mail after his father’s funeral, but he’d always held onto it. He flipped through it now, looking for a mention of a child soldier that he was sure he’d remembered having something to do with one of the things on the long list of his father’s crimes.

“Snake,” he said, returning to the computer and calling him again with letter in hand, “Liquid said he spent time with your father, Big Boss, right?”

“He said Big Boss chose him, yeah,” Snake said, rubbing a little warmth back into his fingers, “I assume that meant he raised him.”

“Okay. Try looking for the name ‘Eli’.”

“‘Eli’, got it.” Snake had to round a corner to the other side of the drawers to get out of the D’s and into the E’s. But he did find there an Eliab - no last name. He carefully opened the drawer about an inch and, after no obvious alarm went off, opened it the rest of the way.

It wasn’t pretty. “Eliab’s” skin was completely black, looked like it had almost the texture of burnished leather, at places had collapsed against his bones, and at other places had large gashes not unlike an overfilled sack splitting at its seams. His face looked oddly swollen, enough that Snake wasn’t 100% sure it was even Liquid’s, and the whole bottom of the drawer was covered in a brownish-black slurry of a fluid that had frozen like a sheet to the metal. There was what was once a toe tag half-stuck in it, of which Snake could barely make out “n. 12/06/1972 m. 28/02/2005”.

“Otacon,” he said, “something’s weird. It looks like he’s been decomposing for a couple weeks.”

“What, recently?”

“No, he’s frozen right now.”

Otacon frowned in thought. “He’s been there for about two years. I guess the refrigeration might have been shut off for some time at some point - I’ll check and see if any of the data I recovered says anything about that. In the meantime, call you tell if it’s Liquid?”

“Same birth and death dates, he’s still got a bit of blond hair, and he’s missing his right arm,” Snake said, then leaned over the drawer to inspect him more closely. Fortunately, the freezing temperature had killed the smell. “I think I can make out his tattoo.”

“So it’s definitely him,” Otacon said, “alright. Put him in the body bag and get out of there before someone notices something.” He signed off again.

And so Snake was faced with the unpleasant task of moving Liquid’s putrefied-then-frozen corpse into the body bag he had brought along. It would have been a simple matter if he wasn’t frozen to the bottom of the drawer with his own deliquesced flesh and other bodily fluids.

_It’s times like this_ , Snake thought as he chipped through the frozen offal with his survival knife, _that I wish I had just stayed in Twin Lakes_. Although to be fair, stealing the rimy, rock-hard, partially decomposed carcass of his own twin brother was something new, even for him.

While he was grateful that Liquid didn’t stink or fall apart in his hands, he also didn’t _move_ , meaning that carrying his body out of the room was less like carrying a body and more like carrying a large, unwieldy block of ice. Snake sincerely hoped that the body bag would prove to be as waterproof as they’d assumed it was.

_My back’s going to be killing me later_ , Snake thought sourly as he slipped into the room just down the hall from morgue, maneuvering carefully so that he could get Liquid through the door without making any noise. That guard he’d tranquilized was still sleeping it off in here. Snake shot him with the M9 again, just in case, once he was done dumping the body bag on the gurney he’d stashed in here earlier.

He looked both ways down the hallway again, just to make sure, then backed the gurney out of the room and headed towards the elevator. So far so good. When the elevator doors opened, there was one guard and one scientist who both stared at Snake in surprise before the guard half-raised his gun. He didn’t finish raising it because Snake shot him before he could do that, let alone fire or alert the other guards. Snake also tranquilized the scientist who had ineffectually attempted to hide behind the guard.

He dragged their bodies out of the elevator, pushed the gurney in, and rode it up the ground floor.

From the ground floor to the outside should have been simple, but somehow there was a change in atmosphere. Snake quickly stashed the gurney in an unoccupied room and crept to a corner in the hallway, just around which were two guards, headed his way and discussing something in French.

“ _-sent them down there to check a minute ago, but they haven’t radioed in yet_ ,” the first one said.

“ _Maybe they’re still checking it out._ ”

“ _Stupid! They walk in the morgue and they either see that there’s a missing body or they don’t. It should take seconds!_ ”

The guards passed around the corner, not noticing the cardboard box. “ _Do you really think there’s a body missing? I’d think we’d notice an intruder,_ ” said the second guard.

“ _Well… I don’t know. I still think that the notice that one of the drawers had been opened was a false alarm, but you know, that one scientist kept saying it shouldn’t be a false alarm when it_ kept _saying the drawer was open… so I made him go with…”_

They entered the elevator and Snake dashed for Liquid’s body. So there had been an alarm. And as soon as those guards stepped out of the elevator on the lowest floor of the facility, they were going to see their tranquilized comrades and send everything into alert mode.

He made quick time to the exit. He was still a few yards from the door when he heard the first guard from earlier yelling over another guard’s radio, “ _We have an intruder! He’s stolen one of the frozen bodies. Keep a look out! He’s armed with tranquilizers and possibly lethal weaponry as well! You are authorized to kill!!_ ” The guard whose radio Snake had just heard this over, who had been guarding the door, started and looked around himself, readying his gun. After a tense moment, he carefully stalked down the hall - in the opposite direction as Snake.

Snake breathed a silent sigh of relief and maneuvered the gurney out from behind the stack of crates that had just barely hidden both it and himself. He slipped out the door.

There were no guards out here anymore, or at least not in the immediate area. There was, however, a hill in the way of Snake’s most direct path to the woods where the _Nomad_ was parked.

“I don’t have time to find another way,” Snake muttered to himself, pulling the gurney up the hill backwards so he could keep an eye on the facility.

He was just about at the top of the hill when a guard came running around the perimeter of the building and spotted Snake. “Arrêtez!” he yelled, running over and pointing his gun at Snake.

Snake went for his own gun but as he removed just his one hand from the gurney, it began rolling back downhill. He grabbed the gurney again, ducking just as the guard fired a shot. Snake flinched as it hit him in the bicep.

Things had gone bad, fast.

He grabbed the body bag - Liquid must be starting to thaw, it had some give to it now - and in the same motion shoved the gurney down the hill. It ran over the guard below and Snake made his escape into the forest with the stolen cadaver slung over his shoulders. Blood was running down his arm…

Now, where exactly was the _Nomad_ parked?

“Otacon,” Snake said urgently over the Codec, “where is the _Nomad_? The whole facility’s on alert and they’re going to know where I ran off to in just a second.”

“I’m just north of your position, Snake,” Otacon said. “I’ve got the cooler and plastic bags ready for you.”

“Better get the first aid kit out, too.”

“You’re wounded…?!”

“Just a flesh wound. How far away are you?”

“You’re not far now,” Otacon said, then looked up from the computer screen. “I - is that you I’m hearing outside right now, Snake?”

Snake slowed, panting slightly and glancing around. “I’m not _that_ nearby, am I?”

“I didn’t think-“

“Otacon,” Snake interrupted quietly, “I hear people moving around in the woods, too. There’s a good chance they’re guards.”

“…they sound close, Snake. Too close.”

Things had gone from bad to worse.

“Go get a gun,” Snake said flatly.

“But-“

“Get one, Otacon, and if one of those guards comes knocking - you shoot _first_.”

“I-“

Snake hung up. Otacon swallowed hard, then stood up from the computer. He could still hear people moving around outside, nearer now.

“Hé, ici!”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est? …un autocaravane?”

“Ouais. C’est suspicieux, dedans-la. Tu vas, et j’vais continuer du nord.”

“OK.”

Otacon didn’t speak French, but he _did_ know that that definitely wasn’t Snake out there. He ran to the back room and grabbed the SOCOM, silently praying to he-didn’t-even-know that he wouldn’t have to fire it.

There was a knock on the door.

“Ouvrez la porte, maintenant! Vous stationnez sur la propriété privée!”

Otacon was too scared to answer, and pretended that the RV was empty. The person outside didn’t fall for it, and hammered on the door again.

“Ouvrez la porte!!”

When Otacon still didn’t answer, the guard kicked the door open, pointing his FAMAS inward. He was a little surprised to see a skinny nerd already pointing a pistol at the door with shaking hands, and that surprise - and the brief hesitation that it cost him - was his downfall.

There was the sound of a silenced gun firing. He keeled over backwards.

“Why. The hell. Didn’t you shoot?” Snake hissed, standing just behind the guard, pale, bleeding, body bag over one shoulder, and M9 in one hand.

“I - I-I couldn’t,” Otacon said, dropping the SOCOM on the table and rushing out to help Snake and his cargo into the _Nomad_. “I just thought - I just thought that if I pulled the trigger he’d be _dead_ and I-“

“Better him than you. You’re lucky I got here in time,” Snake growled, dropping the body bag on the floor and half-collapsing into a chair. He closed his eyes with a drawn-out sigh, pressing one hand against his gunshot wound. “Another second and he would have killed you, Otacon. You shouldn’t have hesitated.”

“But I-“ Otacon turned away from him abruptly, and staggered to the front of the _Nomad_ , jumping behind the wheel. He was still feeling jittery. “Just hang on, Snake. We need to get out of here first.”

“…damn lucky I got here in time,” Snake muttered as Otacon tore the _Nomad_ out of the forest, swerving dangerously around a group of guards. He pulled out onto the road, breaking several traffic laws (especially the speeding ones) and a minute later they being pursued by several black Cadillacs packed to the nines with armed guards.

The body bag slowly slid across the floor of the _Nomad_ as everything tilted in a high-speed curve. The SOCOM flew off the table, and Snake caught it with the hand that wasn’t currently applying pressure to his arm. He checked the chamber as there was a loud screech of brakes and a crash outside. Empty. Poor Otacon was so terrified that he’d forgotten to pull back the slide first. Gunfire outside now, _pang_ ing against the back of the _Nomad_. Otacon executed another hairpin turn and everything went sliding the other way. Snake checked the magazine and found it to be empty as well.

_He completely forgot to load the gun at all_ , Snake thought in alarm. He hadn’t been very confident in the first place, considering Otacon was an absolutely atrocious shot, but he hadn’t expected something _this_ bad. Either they were going to figure out a way to keep the _Nomad_ way the hell away from the action, or Snake was going to have to force Otacon to put in a lot more time practicing.

There was another crash and an explosion, and finally Otacon’s steering leveled out and they were on their way south again, looking like normal campers apart from the bullet-holes and dented door.

“I think we lost them,” Otacon said at length.

“Good job, kid,” Snake said, “we need to talk about your shooting, though.”

“Oh, god, Snake, I just couldn’t-“

“You didn’t even load your pistol,” Snake said, getting up to put back the weapons and retrieve the first aid kit. “You can’t panic like that on the battlefield. That’s how you die.”

“I wasn’t _on_ the battlefield!” Otacon said, “I was just supporting your infiltration over Codec. How was I supposed to know that someone was going to come right up the _Nomad_ and-“

“You knew it was a possibility,” Snake said, returning to the kitchen table and opening the first aid kit. “We both knew that something like that might happen one day. That’s why I taught you how to shoot.”

“But I can’t - I can’t kill anyone, Snake! Maybe if I had a tranquilizer gun I could have-“

“No,” Snake said flatly, peeling off the top part of his sneaking suit and pressing it against his injury, “when someone’s pointing a gun at you, you have less than a second to stop them - and tranquilizers only take effect instantly if you manage to shoot them in the head. There’s no way you’d ever actually get a shot in on someone’s head, Otacon.”

“I…”

“And when you’ve found someplace to park, come back here and give me a hand with this, will you? The bullet’s in a little too deep for me to pull it out myself.”

Give or take fifteen minutes later, Otacon had sequestered the _Nomad_ just outside a small town filled with old buildings and joined Snake in the kitchen.

“I’m serious. You need to practice more. Get more used to handling a gun,” Snake said as Otacon disinfected the forceps.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be used to handling a gun,” Otacon mumbled.

“It’s not like I’m asking you to kill anyone.”

“Right,” Otacon said, swatting Snake’s free hand away from his gunshot wound, “you just want me to be _ready_ to, if I have to. Hold still.”

“If you have to - if you’re in danger of being killed yourself, Otacon. You - _ow,_ ” he hissed in pain as Otacon fished around in the wound for the bullet. “Be a little more gentle, will you?”

“I’m doing my best. Hold still before the bullet starts to break up.”

Snake grunted. “Look, Otacon…”

“Can we just not talk about it, Snake? Please?”

“No. Do you remember what I said back at Shadow Moses, when you followed me up the Communications Tower to ask me if love could bloom on a battlefield?”

Otacon didn’t even glance up, still focusing on Snake’s injury. “You said,” he said slowly, “that if you love someone, you have to be able to protect them.”

“Right.” Snake took a deep breath. “But I’m not always around, and I’m not going to always be around. So I have to make sure you can protect yourself.”

Otacon wordlessly pulled out the bullet, looked at it (it was still intact), and dropped it into a napkin on the table. He put down the forceps and picked up a bottle of saline. Snake shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“…you’re not a soldier,” Snake said at length, “and I don’t want you to be. I know it’s not easy to think you might be responsible for someone’s death, but… you get over it.”

Otacon didn’t tell him, as he wiped the blood off Snake, that he was already responsible for someone’s death, and even after ten years he had never gotten over it. How could he?

“And it’s better than being dead.”

Neither of them said anything as Otacon wrapped a bandage tightly around Snake’s arm. As soon as that was done, and Otacon turned slightly away, Snake slung his uninjured arm around Otacon’s shoulders and pulled him close.

“I thought you were going to die,” he said softly.

“I thought I was too.” Otacon couldn’t look him in the eye.

Snake pressed a single kiss to his forehead. “I don’t know what I’d do if you were killed. Probably murder whoever did it and then go drink myself to death somewhere.”

“Don’t talk like that, Snake…”

Snake kissed him again, on the mouth this time, and Otacon kissed back, running one hand through his hair. It was brief, and when they parted Snake glanced at the body bag still on the floor and muttered, “Guess we should take care of that now.”

Liquid’s corpse had thawed more while they were driving and tending to Snake’s injury - fortunately the body bag was indeed water-tight, although when Snake lifted up half of it (the half with the legs, from what he could tell) he faintly smell the wet, sweet stench of rotted meat. The texture under the black plastic of the body bag was thick and slimy. Snake dragged Liquid into the extra-large cooler and Otacon helped shove him down to fit, which was much easier now than it would have been an hour ago. His flesh offered no resistance and his bones readily popped out of place. They put the lid on the cooler.

Otacon started duct-taping the trash bags over the outside of the cooler, and Snake glanced over at the computer, where several pages of a letter were sitting on the keyboard. “By the way, Otacon,” Snake said, picking up the letter, “how did you figure out that Liquid’s real name was Eli?”

“I…” Otacon looked up, then practically launched himself over the cooler to snatch the letter from Snake’s hands. Snake held it up just out of his reach. “Don’t read that!!”

“I wasn’t,” Snake said mildly, staring at Otacon in surprise. “I asked you a question.”

“M-My father knew him. He was mentioned in the letter but I didn’t think Eli was Liquid until it occurred to me earlier. Now give it back!” Snake slowly lowered his hand slightly, and Otacon snatched the letter from him and shoved it in his pocket, glaring at Snake.

“Is that letter from your father?” Snake said, confused.

“No,” Otacon said heatedly, picking up the roll of duct tape again. “No, it’s… anonymous.”

“That was Master Miller’s handwriting.”

They both stared at each other for a long moment.

“… _what?”_


End file.
